Noodle Auf Lauf

This recipe is a favorite with our family. It came from my dear German friend, Ulrike, when I lived in England. She made it often for her family and for me when I went over to eat and I was hooked! It is such an easy meal to make and taste's divine. I mean, how can you go wrong with hotdogs, cheese, and pasta? Hope you enjoy!!

Ingredients:

12oz box pasta - you can use any shape, I prefer Rotini
8oz cheddar cheese - or can use whatever you like best
6-8 hotdogs or 1 smoked sausage, cut into bite-size pieces
2 large tomatoes
Season salt or salt and pepper
Dried Oregano - about 2 Tablespoons

Step 1: Boil pasta according to directions on the box.

Step 2: While pasta is cooking, chop the hotdogs or smoked sausage, and tomato into bite-size chunks.

Step 3: Grate the cheese. Please don't buy pre-grated cheese, it really doesn't melt as well!

Step 4: Once pasta is done, drain the water and layer half the cooked pasta onto the bottom of a casserole dish.  Add a layer of half the chopped hotdog and half the tomatoes. Sprinkle with season salt and 1 Tablespoon (or so!) of oregano, to taste. 

 

Step 5: Sprinkle half the grated cheese on top of the pasta, hotdogs, tomatoes, and seasonings. Then make a second layer on top the same as before ending with the cheese.

Step 6: Place a microwave lid or some plastic wrap (with a vent opening) on to the casserole dish and microwave 6-8 mins on high, depending on your microwave. 

The cheese will have melted and it will be hot all the way through! Let rest a few mins, then serve immediately! You can add your favorite veggie or a salad along with this to bulk it out more. It should feed 4-6 depending on how big an eater you are!!

Enjoy!!!

Lemon Cake

So I just received this in my email inbox. It is from Paula Deen's magazine and you can go to Cooking With Paula Deen to see the original. It looks SO good that I think I will have to get some lemons this weekend and try it out! Sounds refreshing for these hot August days. I LOVE baking cakes and am always looking for new cake recipes to find the 'perfect' ones for each flavor! Let me know if you try it and how it turns out!


Lemon Cake with Lemon Butter Cream

Makes 1 8 inch round cake

Ingredients:
1 cup butter, softened
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs, room temperature 
1 tablespoon lemon zest
¼ cup fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups cake flour
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk, room temperature
Lemon Buttercream Frosting 
(recipe follows)
Garnish: lemon zest



Preheat oven to 350°. Spray 2 (8-inch) round cake pans with nonstick baking spray with flour. Line bottoms with parchment paper rounds. Spray top of each parchment paper round with nonstick baking spray with flour.

In a large bowl, beat butter at medium speed with a mixer until creamy; gradually add sugar, beating for 5 minutes or until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating just until yellow disappears after each addition. Add lemon zest, lemon juice, and vanilla, beating just until blended.

In a medium bowl, sift together cake flour, baking powder, and salt; gradually add to butter mixture alternately with buttermilk, beginning and ending with flour mixture, beating at low speed just until blended after each addition.

Using a soup ladle, spoon batter evenly into prepared cake pans.

Bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire racks for 10 minutes. Remove from pans, and cool completely on wire racks. Wrap cake layers in plastic wrap. Freeze layers until ready to frost.

To frost cake, unwrap cake layers. Spread Lemon Buttercream Frosting between layers and on sides and top of cake. Garnish with lemon zest, if desired. Store cake, covered, in refrigerator up to 3 days.

*For great basic vanilla cake layers, omit the lemon zest and lemon juice and increase the vanilla extract          to 1 ½ tablespoons.

Lemon Buttercream Frosting
Makes about 4 cups

1 cup butter, softened
2 tablespoons lemon zest
¼ cup fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons milk
5 cups confectioners’ sugar
Yellow food coloring gel

In a medium bowl, beat butter at medium speed with a mixer until creamy. Beat in lemon zest, lemon juice, and milk. Gradually add confectioners’ sugar, beating until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in food coloring gel, just a small amount at a time, to reach desired color.

My First Online Bible Study

I am SO excited about participating in my very first online Bible study with the ladies over at Proverbs 31 Ministries. The Bible study is based on Lisa Terkerst's book "What Happens When Women Say Yes to God." This is the first day and I have already been challenged by a technique for meditating and memorizing God's Word that I have known about before, just under a different name. The 'new' name I learned today is called 'verse mapping' and the info about this can be found here. We are working on Deuteronomy 6:5 today.

"You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might." (ESV)

So far I have circled the word, 'You' at the beginning of the verse realizing that this is a personal challenge for me to put into practice. 

The second word I circled is 'shall' (looks like I might circle EVERY word :-)) which is a helping verb meaning it is something that will happen in the future. The idea here is that it is a command to make sure you DO love God. It is intentional. I need to consciously think about and act on loving God and make it a priority, planning on it being a reality in my life.  

I will continue to work on this verse through the day and this week. I am excited about how God will work and change my own heart to be drawn closer to Him through this study. Thank you ladies at Proverbs 31! 

Lesson In Giving

Recently I have become more aware of society's drive toward 'entitlement', especially in the lives of children, teens, and their parents. It is another good reminder that I need to be aware of the cultural peer pressures that can often engulf you when you aren't really noticing, and instead strive to promote a godly life-walk in my own life and in the lives of my family. It is so easy to fall into the traps around us, to not really realize the dangers that often lay there. So I have been trying to be more 'intentional' (a word used VERY often by our pastor!), about teaching my children to serve others, and to think about ways they can show love and kindness and help to those around us. It all starts with me. If I fail to model this attitude and life-walk, then they fail right along with me. While perusing through Pinterest (my one weakness!) I found an e-book called Teach Me to Serve: 99 Ways Preschoolers Can Learn to Serve and Bless Others and Kristen Summers has such a godly heart of love and service to others and teaching her children to do likewise. It was a blessing and HUGE help to me as I search for ways to make this practical in our everyday lives. I highly recommend it to any family who has preschoolers and wants to, well, teach them to serve! 

Our local Christian Moody radio station sponsors the Shoes for Orphan's Souls, a ministry of Buckner International, shoe drive every year. Last year I bought a pair of shoes and socks to send to them and they in turn send those shoes to a precious little one in desperate need of them. At that time I had a very young toddler and an infant. This year I have two sweet toddlers and one who's little mind is already understanding bigger concepts! She has shown the natural signs of 'entitlement' so we thought it was time to start helping her (and me!) develop an attitude of serving and giving. If we make it a part of our lives often enough, it will become a life pattern, which is my heart's desire. So back to the shoes!

We got up this morning and my husband and I decided the Lord has blessed us so much that we want to pour out the overflow into someone else. So during breakfast we talked about there being children who do not have even ONE pair of shoes to wear and how we have so many pairs of shoes. We asked our eldest what she thought about getting some shoes for those children and her eyes got wider. She was SO excited about the idea. We drove to the shoe store, picked out a few pairs of shoes with her and her sister's help. Then we took them to our Christian book store drop-off location. This is what it looked like:

Dropping the shoes in the donation box.

All our shoes...we were the first to donate!

Dropping another pair in!

 

This is a fantastic project and mission to children around the world and touches my heart. I love children, and cannot bear to think there are so many that do not even have even one pair of shoes to help keep them healthy and protected and allow them to attend school. I love this video about the ministry of Shoes for Orphan's Souls. And if I can purchase just one pair, that's one more child that will have them than otherwise. I am humbled by this work and their love to others. What a blessing to other children to get the shoes, and to my children to learn the joy of giving!

Serving Christ

Recently my husband and I put together an Excel spreadsheet of our use of time. We separated everything into our family's categories and wrote down the time we spent on each one on average. My husband then made it into a pie chart to get a better visual picture and we were shocked at many things. But one thing that did stand out to us was how little time we actually put into church or ministry related activities. It was a measly 4% of our time each week! And here we were thinking we were doing SO much for God! Often we would find ourselves grumbling about how much time church would take. Satan always likes to get in there and get us to think about a LIE instead of the TRUTH which only comes from God. This also prodded me into thinking about what else I could do as a mother and wife, and our family as a whole, to carry out the great commission of getting the gospel out to people around us. While reading through the book of Acts, I found this wonderful excerpt from the "Family Life Marriage Bible." This was written by Dennis and Barbara Rainey and was immensely helpful to me:

We Are Part of the Solution

"The Army of God needs fresh troops. The enemy is real. The message is powerful. The hour couldn't be more urgent. And God wants to use you and your family to do just what he did in the book of Acts, "And the word of the Lord was being spread throughout all the region" (13:49). 'So what do I do?' you ask. How can my spouse and I be a part of what God is doing? Here are a few ideas. Together, we will make a difference.

1. Hold an evangelistic dinner party at your home for a few couples.

2. Host a Good News Club for children in your neighborhood.

3. Purchase a bundle of The Four Spiritual Laws [or some other tract/booklet] booklet. Leave some on your desk for people to pick up and read. Put some in your pocket or purse. Share them or give them away as you do your errands.

4. Show your children how to share their faith and invite a neighborhood child to go to church.

5. Host an evangelical coffee a couple of weeks before Christmas for your neighborhood or friends.

6. Share Christ with the next person you sit next to on a plane, bus or train.

7. Host a HomeBuilders Bible study with three or four couples who need to know Christ.

The mission of the church hasn't changed in over 2,000 years. We're still called to help spread the gospel to all people. Make your home the springboard for sharing the greatest news the world has ever heard!"

These word have challenged and inspired me to do more in reaching others for the cause of Christ. Sharing the wonderful news of a Savior who has come to give forgiveness and eternal life!! What will you do?

Cute Quote

Loved watching "Despicable Me", so sweet how he is won over by 3 precious girls! And this quote made both me and Stephen laugh! We've wondered the same thing over some children's books!

Julia's First Birthday Cake

Loved doing this one for my daughter's first birthday back in September! It was strawberry cake with butter-cream icing with some fondant decorations. Shame she wasn't able to eat it with our concerns for a wheat allergy at the time.

So I made her a gluten free cake for her own!! She wasn't too sure about it but liked to lick the icing off!